Food for thought and profit

After the holidays, many restaurants see a dip in business. Motivating your best guests to come back will be especially important to keeping business on track. But when you think of your best guests, does a specific person come to mind — or just a list of traits? Creating a set of guest personas can help you understand who you’re trying to attract and fine-tune your marketing so you encourage them to return. According to The Rail, it’s important to combine both qualitative and quantitative data in your research. Studying your Google analytics data may tell you the age and sex of your average website visitor, for example, but may be less specific about their food preferences. For qualitative information, interview and survey your guests — canvass your mailing list and offering a discount or other promotion for their participation — and ask what they care about. Try to elicit quotes from them to understand what influences them. Your final guest personas — and you can have several categories of them depending on the diversity of guests you serve — can be given a name, vocation and other personal information but shouldn’t necessarily be specific individuals you know in real life. Instead, they should be composites of people who encompass the range of qualities you see in your guest community.

​Get fired up

‘Tis the season for a fire in the fireplace. While preparing foods over a roaring fire is hardly new, the practice is on trend at the moment for the way it brings together basic cooking methods, local ingredients and memorable dining experiences. It can also help you infuse your menu with unexpected flavors. As the owner of the London Log Company told the Telegraph, salmon smoked over firewood has a different flavor depending on the color of the wood. It also allows a chef to constantly monitor a food as it cooks — all while putting on a show for guests. (Use dry woods for a more even burn.) Even if you don’t have the facility for cooking over fire, you can adapt a barbecue by soaking wood chips in water and then sprinkling them over charcoal for similar effect.

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About Food For Thought and Profit

Food For Thought And Profit is brought to you by Team Four Foodservice/Value 4. We offer the latest foodservice trends, news, safety, and technological advances in the industry. We are an outsourced purchasing and logistics company that provides comprehensive supply chain solutions to our customers. Our executive team has many years of foodservice experience and we bring that experience to work for you. We have expertise in all areas of the foodservice sector.